Many cloud solutions store massive amounts of content in a centralized datacenter and rely on high bandwidth network connections in order to serve that content to users upon request. However, content is getting increasingly large. For example, video streaming sites have been adopting support for increasingly large video resolutions. These higher resolution videos require correspondingly higher bandwidth to stream across the network. Many other types of content have also generally been getting larger. For example, lossless audio is becoming increasingly popular and requires significantly more bandwidth to stream as compared to audio in certain high-compression lossy formats. Datacenters that do not adjust to these trends often find that their backbone connection to the Internet is bottlenecking network traffic between the datacenter and its users.
One approach to resolve this problem may be to widen the throughput of the datacenter's backbone connection by installing additional networking infrastructure. However, this approach may be expensive, and is of little help when the bottleneck is further downstream, i.e., beyond the control of the datacenter admin (e.g., in the network of the datacenter's Internet Service Provider or other network).
A different approach may embrace mobile edge computing principles. Mobile edge computing is an approach to networking architecture that attempts to locate resources of the network closer to relevant users (e.g., within edge networks), rather than employing vast amounts of centrally-located computing and networking resources that may be prone to bottlenecking.